


Making a home homely...

by islasands



Series: Lambski [28]
Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Genre: M/M, The beginning of the a beginning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-13
Updated: 2012-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-29 11:11:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islasands/pseuds/islasands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam wants and needs Sauli to come and live with him. But is he prepared?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Making a home homely...

It was late evening and he was alone in his house for the first time in over a week. Thanks to his mother the shipwreck of his household had been raised and restored to sailable condition. His clothes were washed, folded and put away, or had been taken to the dry cleaners. His kitchen was clean, the cupboards well stocked, and the trash had been emptied. The bathroom shone. His sheets were mitred at the corners. His extra pillows, which had been thrown on the floor, had been cased anew and arranged like pillows on a hotel bed.

Blinds had been raised, curtains drawn, and windows opened to air the place out. As a final home-making touch his mother had placed vases of flowers in almost every room.

Adam was grateful. “I’m not usually this bad,” he had said, leaning on the kitchen sink, watching his mother rearrange cutlery in the drawer. “I know that, dear,” his mother had replied. She folded a dishtowel and hung it inside the cupboard beneath the sink. “You have other things on your mind.” She smiled at his frown. “How’s it all going? Work, I mean.” Adam’s frown deepened. “You don’t mean that at all,” he said, glumly turning the kitchen tap on and off for no reason.

“Call him. Ask him!” His mother called back as she went down the garden stairs. 

Adam watched her leave. He turned and leaned his back on the deck railing and looked at his house. Lamps were on. He could see the reflection of flowers in the dining room table. Music was playing. “I’m sick to death of Goldfrapp,” he thought. He turned his back on the house and looked across the valley at all of the houses and their yellow panes of electrical light. A tinkling of wind chimes drifted across the darkness from the house next door. A woman’s voice called out to her cat, “Minty, Minty.”  A child’s voice joined in. Adam looked up at the sky. “I’m sick to death of music, full stop,” he said to its solitary star.

He went inside and sat on the couch. He made his call. He clicked the lap top to full screen. Oh fuck. There he is. Look at him. For a moment he couldn’t think of anything to say. Sauli smiled at his silence and Adam’s hand of its own accord reached out to touch the screen, touch that face. He quickly regretted the gesture and touched his own face instead, briefly placing his fingers over his mouth. The involuntary nature of his physical responses to Sauli were aggravating, especially now, - on a video chat for fuck’s sake.

“I want you to come now. I don’t want to wait. We talked about this and you said you would think about it. Well, you’ve had plenty of time. Are you going to come or not?”

Sauli leaned back on his chair. He was no longer smiling. “That sounds very all or nothing,” he said.

Adam shrugged. “It is. If you don’t want to come…” He realised how casual that might sound and repeated himself, more formally. "If you don't want to come, I will..."

“What is _your_ all, Adam?” Sauli asked. He had leaned forward and his face filled the screen.

Again, Adam was taken aback by seeing his face so close and so far away.

“I’m not asking you to marry me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’m not. I think what you want, what you are asking, is that you want me on the next leg of your journey? Correct?”

Adam felt baffled. He forgot what he was really asking and became argumentative. “More or less,” he said, pulling a face. “Is that a problem?”

“Yes. It is, actually. Why should I get off my horse to ride on the back of yours?”

“Because I’m on it and you want to be with me and I can’t get off it.”

“Not like me.”

“Not like you.”

“So I am more free than you are to do this – this experiment?”

“It’s not a fucking experiment!”

Sauli abruptly disappeared from the screen. He returned holding a cup of something which he took his time stirring. He looked up.

“So. So if I leave my country, my family, my friends, my life, - what are you offering me?”

Adam’s heart was pounding and he didn’t know why.

“My self,” he said. His tone was curt, impatient. 

“That’s not enough. I’m sorry.” Sauli sipped his drink.

“Well. Fuck you!” Adam shouted and the screen went blank!

He decided to have a shower. The friendliness of the hot water made him feel like masturbating but half way through he lost interest and instead joined his hands to form a cup which he repeatedly filled and emptied, pouring its contents onto his chest. He dried himself by putting on his bathrobe. He went into the kitchen and looked in the fridge. He went into the living room and turned on the television. He went downstairs and played the song he had been working on. He went back upstairs, went outside, sat beside the gleaming pool, and called again.

“Don’t hang up,” he said.

“I didn’t. You did.” Sauli laughed.

“I was upset. Things aren’t going so good. I know I shouldn’t depend on you but I do. Already I do. There you go. Are you happy? The truth is I need you.”

There was a long pause.

“What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

Adam stared at a star that was flickering, changing colour from red to blue to white. He was distracted momentarily and wanted to describe it to Sauli. He pulled himself together and looked dolefully at the screen.

“I’ve been hurt,” he said, and it didn’t feel like a lie. “Really hurt,” he added, spurred on by this conviction.

“How did this happen? Who has hurt you?” Sauli’s concern, so obviously heartfelt, made Adam feel his imaginary hurt all the more keenly.

“I can’t say,” he said. “I need you to be here, in person, so that I can say.”

“You can tell me now,” Sauli said

“I think if you loved me you’d be here. No questions asked.”

“I’ll come if it’s the right thing for me to do.”

Adam sighed. He was cold. He wanted to go to bed and he didn’t want to go to bed alone. 

“Pack your bags. I’ve booked a flight. You can be here by midnight tomorrow.”

“No, my love. I’m not doing that.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m clearly not your fucking love. Sauli? Sauli!”

Adam went to bed. He threw all the pillows except one on the floor. He squeezed his eyes shut. He wondered if anyone he knew might still be awake. He would call someone and go out clubbing. But it was a Monday night. He turned on the night light and sat on the side of the bed. He hung his head. He was so tired. He was too tired to be in love. In fact, when he thought about it, he wasn’t in love at all.

He got up and went to his office and turned on his laptop.

“I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”

Sauli smiled at him. “You can call me as often as you like.”

“You love me. I know you do. And I understand what I’m asking. I know I have no right to ask it. But Sauli, I do have things to offer you. My heart, my home, my body, my soul. Every fucking thing I possess. My career! Even that!”

“Your career.”

“Yes, and I’ll prove it. I’ll come to Finland and prove it. In fact I’ll book a flight right now if you don’t believe me. Don’t look at me like that! This is no fucking joke!”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You are. I can tell.”

“I love you, you crazy fucker,” Sauli said, and hung up.

Finally he slept. There was nowhere else to go but to bed and at last there was nothing else to do in it other than sleep. He woke when it was still dark and tried to remember his dream. He was sure Sauli had been in it. There was a house in it too, a house on stilts. He added Lake Titicaca to his fading memory of the dream, and mentally positioned Sauli in a papyrus raft, rowing to meet him. He would tell him the dream, and interpret it, immediately. But the interpretation didn’t come. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he was sure he had been dreaming about appliances that happened to be floating in a harbour. And his mother was in the harbour too, trying to organize things, and she was in a bad mood. Despite having to relinquish his Titicaca version of the dream, he suddenly knew what he had to do and say. He staggered down the hallway, went into the kitchen, which somehow was in as much disarray as it had been before his mother had cleaned it, and drank a glass of water. He sat at the dining room table, opened his lap top, and made his call. Sauli’s face appeared on the screen. It was enough to make Adam cry.

“I love you,” Adam said. “That’s all I want to say.”

Sauli leaned forward and kissed the screen. He wiped the smear of his kiss from his screen.

“And I’ll wait,” Adam said sadly, resigned sleepily to his fate. 

“In that case, I will come,” Sauli said. “As soon as I am ready.”

“And you love me?” Adam was too tired to register what Sauli had said.

“More than I can say in your language.” Sauli began speaking to him in Finnish. Adam closed his eyes. He was too worn out to need anything other than his heart’s translation of his lover's language. He was sure that whatever Sauli was saying it was about him, and about loving him, and that was all he wanted to know. He fell asleep with his head on the keyboard of his laptop. When he woke, he went straight down stairs to his studio and played one of his new songs. It sounded good. It sounded right. 

He went upstairs and stood in the living room with his hands on his hips. He looked out the living room windows at the sunny day ouside. He shifted a vase of flowers a few inches to the left and back again. His phone rang but he decided not to answer it. Instead, humming to himself, and feeling like he wanted to wear rubber gloves and clean something, or hang out washing with pegs, he decided to rearrange the furniture in the sitting room. "I want everything shipshape," he said to himself, pursing his lips the way his mother did when she was busy making her home homely.

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
